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almost always along these lines: You would have died.
    Death was the best of a bad bunch. Other possibilities included disablement and, in some cases, the end of the world, and it was all scientifically proven. In this way REGRET helped people come to terms with life, the world, and their fate.
    For Indridi REGRET fulfilled the role of dreams and nightmares. He found the thought of life hanging on such a narrow thread absolutely terrifying, but there was no point in brooding on it too much as life didn’t come with an instruction book indicating which steps led to fortune or ruin. Indridi sometimes ordered in-depth information about the gory deaths that one small sideways step would have caused him:
    â€œI see that your right arm would have been located at: [N64°05.536' W21°55.321']. The front left wheel of the bus would have been on that exact same spot at the same instant. Forty fractions of a second later your head would have been under the rear left wheel of the bus and four seconds later I can see part of you, probably the guts, wrapped round the front wheel of a Peugeot 205GR. Would you like an artistic or pictorial transcript or will an oral account be sufficient?”
    â€œIt’s okay. I’m satisfied. I’m glad.”
    â€œDo you still have regrets?”
    â€œNo, I have no regrets.”
    â€œGood. That’ll be 1,300 points.”
    REGRET was intended to bring the world closer to happiness. Unhappiness was nourished by regret on the one hand and fear of the future on the other. The more the choice of possibilities multiplied, the more complicated and difficult life became. People lived in one world, but beside that world there were a million other worlds that could have been. People could regret countless life-paths that they could have taken in the past.
    Every single neglected opportunity was a burden on the present. But that’s not the whole story. In the future there were millions of new possible choices and millions resulting from each of those millions. Finally, when one choice was chosen over another, something rather remarkable occurred: everything that was not chosen was converted into regret. As a result, people were forever crushed in the present, under the weight of the future, on top of the pressure of the past, and things did not get any better. The choices multiplied and regret increased in direct correlation until people could not move and became tangled in an invisible web. At this point REGRET came to the rescue and set the past in order. According to REGRET, every single decision people made was the ONLY CORRECT decision. Every single sidestep would have led to death or the end of the world. Every single person had been in mortal danger and only just escaped by making the ONLY CORRECT decision. So people had a duty to be happy. They had survived against all the odds.
    Five years later Indridi was still a very good boy, and he was glad he had never rebelled or got into any other stupid messes. He didn’t need REGRET to tell him that. Otherwise he’d never have met Sigrid when he went out to celebrate his graduation at the dance in his old high school. She had just started the same summer job as him, in the gardening department of LoveDeath’s energy section, but he hadn’t yet had a chance to talk to her. He had seen this beautiful girl pulling up chickweed on the other side of the Ellida river. She wore a white sleeveless top and orange waterproof trousers and wore her hair in two plaits. Next, she was standing on the landing of the old high school with her girlfriend. She smiled and their eyes met and from that moment on they were always together.
    Sigrid was beautiful, good, and fun, and she was still like that more than five years later. Their relationship might’ve been going to the dogs but Indridi was still head over heels in love with her, though he no longer knew whether his love was returned. “Yesterday” echoed in his